The Devil's Dead Persephone

Written by Laura Vance

---

A submission for Elegant Literature's August contest, written with the prompt: "Write a story about Devils in the Dark, and a mirror." Enjoy. Or don't. I can't really tell you what to do.

---

When tubes were arching from my mother like the ribcage of a decaying corpse and the heart monitor that kissed her pallid skin was flatlining, I placed my head on Margot's lap and wept. The floor was slick and clean with sharp antiseptics, the nurses’ shoes made squeaky noises on the tile, and I wept. Margot placed her hand on my head, and she told me we all knew it was coming, that it was supposed to happen ages ago, and still, I wept.

I smelled the vanilla in my mother’s hair and the faint stench of loss. I waited for her hands to twitch but they, too, had flatlined. I saw her divine aura dim as darkness then tried to befriend me, so I asked, “Why couldn’t it have been Dad?”

Mother, my mommy, so peaceful and dead.

It should have been him.

“I don’t think you don’t get much of a choice when you sell your soul to the Devil,” she told me in her quiet voice. Margot was often quiet, and the knees of her blue jeans were wet with my tears. I knew she was right.

In many ways before death, I think my mother was a slave. Though Margot was right, I suppose – she had sold her soul to the Devil – I often wonder if she could have worn her shackles better. If she could have found her pride. Instead, she found the sole of his shoe rather comfortable, content to be squashed, over and over again, carrying the faint hope (or delusion) that one day, he would step on her one last time and, despite their binding contract, she would rise as his equal.

Even I know the Devil never plays fair.

He came to visit her much later in his nauseating swirl of self-importance. He likely figured we would have left by now, but the Devil and his vacuity of a heart vastly underestimated our sympathy. The sun was setting with the dimming hospital lights, cloaking the room with a stale and appropriately lifeless sort of darkness. Even then, his horned, pitchforked silhouette loomed in the threshold for a moment, covering the room with an impossibly darker shadow that climbed up the walls, and Mom’s corpse infinitesimally frowned. He tried to fit his enormous wings through the door, molting his blackened, singed feathers all over the shining tiles with every (thump) attempt to (thump) get through (thump) the doorframe (THUMP). On his final thrust, he ducked into the room in a storm of swirling feathers and their stink of sin and smoke. I wasn’t aware when Margot and I had begun to hold hands, but my fingers were suddenly sore from her grip.

He placed his pitchfork against the corner nearest to the door.

“So… she’s dead,” he said in that cavalier tone of his.

He sighed and popped open a bag of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies that he must have bought at the hospital vending machine.

Crumbs littered the floor with his feathers as he walked to her corpse, more pale and distraught than ever, and placed a gentle kiss on her forehead. When he rose, her skin was festering with a deep, blistering burn. Mom frowned deeper.

Margot could sense me about to fight him – scratch at his eyes, bite off his claws, even rip off those ridiculous horns like vengeful tweezers claiming a stubborn hangnail – though I had yet to move a muscle. She squeezed my hand harder, if that was even possible, and I nestled further back into my flaming seat.

He sat on the foot of her deathbed, facing us now, and though it burned, I stared straight back at the glowing red dots that were his eyes.

He extracted another pack of Famous Amos cookies from somewhere within his cloak. This time, he took only one cookie, looking at it carefully.

“I wonder what she sold herself to me for,” he ultimately mused before popping the cookie into his mouth. He looked very much like The Thinker or some other great philosopher in the midst of an impossible question.

Margot and I stared at each other. I could see the subtle hint of alarm in her eyes that she was trying to hide, which must have reflected the fear in my own.

He crunched on another cookie, baiting us, expecting one of us to answer, red dots darting back and forth, almost gleeful in our confusion.

“You mean you don’t know?” It burst from me and I desperately wanted to catch those words in the air and stuff them back down my throat. Maybe even sew my lips together for good measure.

The Devil smiled at me.

If it wouldn’t have evaporated in a pathetic cloud of steam, I might have spat on him.

“Typically when I make my deals,” he sighed as he took another cookie, “they’re always pestering me with their end of the bargain. It’s often some stupid, flighty thing they think will lead to this great happiness, and I’m a fair businessman, so I don’t let them go into it all blind. I discuss the pros and the cons, of course, and they typically decide that not owning their own soul isn’t a great enough con to neglect going through with whatever imbecilic thing they desire. But her,” the Devil glanced at my mother, her frowning corpse and the burn on her forehead beginning to sizzle, “she came happily. She gave me her soul and smiled without wanting anything in return. I wonder why.”

Margot stiffened beside me. The composed sister. I never had to fear her doing something rash.

But then she called the Devil an idiot and I flinched.

He flinched too, his red eyes simmering into burning hot coals inside his skull.

“You are nothing but a stupid girl, what could you even know?”

“And you are nothing but a stupid fallen angel, and somehow you know even less.”

He crushed the cookie he was holding between his claws, sprinkling crumbs and bits of chocolate on the sea of feathers beneath us.

“She came to you with the one wish all wives ever have: to be loved and cherished and all those ‘stupid’ things you still somehow find beneath yourself.” Though she remained seated next to me, squeezing my hand for dear life, she towered over the demon, and for a moment, he almost looked afraid.

He tried to burn us with his eyes, Famous Amos forgotten on the ground.

A fallen angel, indeed. In my earliest memories, he didn’t always have those horns. He was a wingless man who didn’t smell like Hell, and, often, he smiled. There were times when he would drive us to the store and buy us each a doll, or sing us to sleep in a whispered, gruffy hum that could make my brain fuzz over with a tired bliss. He would help Margot and I bake chocolate chip cookies before eating half the pan. I suppose only the important things about him have changed.

I think it all must have happened rather slowly – the horns methodically protruding from his skull, his nails refusing drugstore clippers, baby feathers lilting off his back in the shower and clogging the drain. At some point, he picked up a pitchfork at Ace Hardware and I haven’t seen him without it since. He screamed more, he smashed plates, he called Mom terrible things and did all that is characteristic of a father to do. Margot and I would share strange, scared looks as Mom went about, sweeping up his feathers and shards of china, casting longing glances at the man who ignored her as he shoved his face with the cookies he no longer helped us bake.

He had become the Devil through and through, cruel and calculating, keeping score for his own gain, tightening the wedding band around her ring finger like a tourniquet from Hell. And still she washed his socks, brought him soup in bed, bought him his favorite CDs from the store for no great occasion, and she loved him. For fear or devotion, I’ll never truly know.

She, his willing Persephone, loved him so much it killed her.

“Do you even recognize yourself anymore?” Margot asked him in a hoarse whisper.

Moments of terrible silence had passed, and she was crying now, little streams fighting their way down her red-hot face.

The Devil was at war with himself, sagging wings, infernus eyes, claws that flexed and relaxed, reached and retracted.

“When you look in the mirror, do you see what you’ve become? Do you?”

When the Devil didn’t answer, Margot marched to him, unafraid, grasping the back of his dark, scaly neck and shoving it in front of the hospital room’s mirror.

“Do you see your horns? Your ugly feathers? Do your eyes burn you? Do you see who you have allowed yourself to be?” She was shoving his face closer to the mirror, screaming now, as water stormed from her eyes. “Or is it my dad? My real dad, who would actually care about his dead wife? What, what do you see? Who the Hell are you?”

His nose was nearly scraping the cheap, cracked glass. More feathers joined their brothers on the blanketed floor, and Margot fell with them, wailing like a child as the Devil helplessly stood above her, so stupid and so big, his molting plumage ultimately digging a second grave for the weeping girl on the hospital floor.

I closed my eyes as I always did when Margot was crying and Dad was fuming and Mom was nowhere to be found. I squeezed my eyes so hard they wrinkled, so hard I saw little blue and red dots dancing with one another, and when I opened them, the Devil was gone. Margot was buried beneath the feathers – I could still hear her muffled sobs – and a half-eaten bag of Famous Amos cookies was resting in Mom’s dead, gray hand.

I stared at the bag all night, and it wasn’t until Margot’s sobs ebbed the next morning when I finally threw it away.